The Long View

The Long View shows how firm the grounding of the avant-garde can be, and how wide its reach. The poems range from ten lines to thirteen pages, their forms from pentameters to prose, their voices from political to personal. They offer us invention so profligate and precise it might as well be seeing and meaning (“things coming toward their shadows”), language born for the things of its world.

The Long View is Charles O. Hartman’s best book to date. It feels often as if Ashbery were being filtered through Louise Bogan, or as if the voices of James Tate and W.H. Auden could be intermittently heard.

Mary Kinzie

A selection of technically deft and diverting poems . . . opens this polyphonic fifth collection. Hartman [also] explores the prose poem and the miniature essay. . . . [P]hilosophical meditation (on voice, alphabet, anatomy, genealogy, etymology, photography, constraint writing, and materials such as brick, glass, and ice) is joined with disjunctive syntax to brilliant effect…

Publishers Weekly

Things Coming Toward Their Shadows

mostly falling
speak to us of falling
leaf
I think this through
and my steps begin to meet
the ground like mild ghosts

a monarch
half asleep with autumn
wobbling near my hand
huge wings shuddering
the body back and forth in
pendulous air

in heedless election
falls and clings
to the base of my thumb
ebony pipestem
legs embrace
the feet prickle

the tongue
hangs like a mainspring
O for the moment I
bear that weight
I weigh
nothing else

Shave

I'm thinking about how I shave my face because yesterday
I shaved my father's for the first time. This sun's going to rise
a little farther right now every day. Soon I will return
to my normal life in another city and the year will decay
in an orderly fashion. He gestured me to cut
off the mustache. I wouldn't. Everybody I said, every
damn body should have a mustache. Life is trouble.
Later I strode out looking for the car: one who can

walks from the hospital. This mirror,
I can't get it right. The edge of my eye
comes and goes, watering. After a while I know
the days will turn back and walk north. I try to do
what I'm told. My sneeze rings louder in my father's house,
I pace his carpets on naked feet, one of his cigarettes
in my hand. All the machines there hum and glow,
warming up, ready with readouts.

Outside his window, here, a mockingbird
runs on for minutes without repeating, stops
to consider her options, runs it exactly through once more.
She does the wren, the crow, the creaking door.
The sun gives up and lets go of the horizon.
I turn the light off and the razor on,
get back to work on a face I know
even in shadow.